First Amendment
Courts Reluctant to Stop Divorcing Bloggers From Airing Complaints
Posted Apr 18, 2008, 08:47 am CDT
By Debra Cassens Weiss
Courts are reluctant to stop divorcing bloggers from revealing intimate details of their marriages or engaging in angry rants about their spouses in online postings.
The courts are citing the First Amendment in refusing to intervene, the New York Times reports.
A New York judge has refused to block a divorced parent known as Laurie from podcasting at DivorcingDaze.com, the Times story says. She started the venture during her divorce in 2006 in which she and a divorced friend tape discussions about divorced life and post them to the Web. Some of Laurie's discussions have concerned the discovery of her husband’s cheating and his justifications for it.
Laurie’s husband contended the podcasts were derogatory and violated terms of a divorce settlement that bar her from harassing or maligning him. But the judge ruled in the past few weeks that her comments, though “ill-advised,” were protected by the First Amendment.
In another case earlier this year, a Vermont judge at first told William Krasnansky to stop blogging a fictionalized account of his divorce, but then changed his mind.
A researcher with the Pew Project, Mary Madden, told the Times that more divorcing spouses are taking out their anger online, a trend that’s not surprising in light of statistics showing the percentage of Internet users with personal blogs has quadrupled in five years.
“It is a blank slate to unload all the frustrations and emotions of a personal crisis,” she said.
At least one divorce lawyer is reacting to the trend. Deborah Lans of New York City told the Times she includes a confidentiality agreement in divorce settlements that bars the spouses from publishing even fictionalized tales of their marriage.
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Posted by Kathleen BIrd - 2 months, 2 weeks, 4 days, 10 hours, 38 minutes ago
Not only is the easy access to internet blogging a problem for the spouse of the disgruntled litigant, it is increasingly a problem for the court, as litigants air their grievances about how their judge ruled in their case. Judicial ethics discourage rebuttal. The public has no way of knowing the accuracy or inaccuracy of the portrayal of “justice received” on a blog. The adage “don’t believe it just because it’s on the internet” doesn’t seem to resonate with the public as much as we would hope.